Situating Early America's Identities in the Atlantic World Benjamin E. Park
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49th Parallel, Vol. 34 (Autumn 2014) Park ISSN: 1753-5894 Situating Early America’s Identities in the Atlantic World Benjamin E. Park* University of Cambridge ‘We are all Atlanticists now’, David Armitage declared—likely tongue-in-cheek—in 2002.1 If such a statement seemed a bit exaggerated at the time, it seems only commonplace a decade later. The amount of scholarship that has appeared in the last few years that utilises a theoretical model of Atlantic history and establishes Atlanticism as its grounding framework demonstrates the fruition of the so-called ‘Atlantic turn’ in US historiography. What was once a trendy—if still peripheral—topic in the academy is now commonplace, and drives the American publishing and job market to an extent that likely surprises those who plead for the methodological adjustment.2 This is especially the case for early American history, particularly during the period that immediately follows the American Revolution, commonly referred to as the early republic, and the political cultures and nationalisms produced therein. W. M. Verhoeven’s proclamation in 2002 that ‘the many revolutions that produced the national ideologies, identities, and ideas of state of present-day American and Europe’ were shaped by a ‘trialogue (between France and Britain and America)’—a statement designed to drive a radically new methodological model—now seems pedestrian, if not an understatement.3 * Benjamin E. Park ([email protected]) is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Missouri. He holds graduate degrees from the Universities of Edinburgh and Cambridge. 78 49th Parallel, Vol. 34 (Autumn 2014) Park ISSN: 1753-5894 The previous few years have been an especially fruitful period for this approach. Particularly, a specific subtheme of this approach has drawn increased attention: the Atlantic world’s relationship to the formation of American identities. Book after book have appeared that claim a new perspective on how Americans came to understand their national image, and often emphasise the role foreign influences played. British pundits, French Jacobins, Haitian slaves, Irish rebels, German revolutionaries, and even oriental imports, these books tell us, had a large influence on how citizens of the newly United States understood their own national character. Indeed, this reasoning implies, the American ‘image’ was created in direct opposition to these distinctive and foreign ‘others’. The cover of Sam Haynes’ book, which explores early American Anglophobia, reproduces a mid-nineteenth century political cartoon that could likewise serve as the standard image for this common narrative: a short, hooligan Jonathan (representing America) positions himself in a dramatic defensive pose meant to compensate for his incommensurate appearance in relation to the towering figure of foreign culture—in this case, an overly smug, pompous, portly, and rosy-cheeked John Bull (representing Britain). In the formation of American-ness, the ‘other’ played as distinct a role as the ‘self’.4 With this emphatic push for a transnational perspective on early American identities, it is useful to take a step back and examine the state of the field and ask what the Atlantic framework offers the study of early American nationalism. This paper seeks to do three things in assessing this methodological movement. First, it engages the theoretical underpinnings upon which most of the recent literature operates. Much of this work, in tracing the development of an American ‘identity’ within the context of an 79 49th Parallel, Vol. 34 (Autumn 2014) Park ISSN: 1753-5894 Atlantic world, must first consider what an ‘identity’ entails. Was it the same thing as the production and promotion of nationalism? Historical work on ‘nationalism’ and ‘identity’ from the last two decades have drawn from Benedict Anderson’s ‘imagined community’ thesis, yet elements of that framework have crumbled as a result of several recent historiographical trends.5 Where does American nationalism studies stand today, and how might an Atlantic framework both build upon and deconstruct those developed premises? Second, this paper engages these studies by focusing particularly on a number of works since 2007 that focus on identity construction within the United States during the early republic period. By comparing these books’ Atlantic frameworks and postulating what types of benefits and pitfalls such frameworks represent, I hope to demonstrate broader historiographical trends of cultural transmission, intellectual genealogy, patriotic cosmopolitanism, and identity formation. As the broad umbrella of Atlantic history encompasses a broad range of methodologies and approaches, I will give an overview of the disciplinary fields upon which these recent books are built, and then organise them into two broad categories: first, those that attempt to trace physical bodies and tangible materials across the ocean, and second, those that attempt to trace foreign ideas—or, at least, perception of foreign ideas. Finally, the third goal of the paper is to offer general observations on the task of viewing early United States history and culture within the framework of Atlantic studies, as well as contemplate some potential avenues for future study. Specifically, I will focus on the pitfalls of cultural translation across the ocean and between regions, and how the many (mis)appropriations on behalf of the Americans demonstrate the necessity of keeping a deep understanding of the American context even viewed within an Atlantic 80 49th Parallel, Vol. 34 (Autumn 2014) Park ISSN: 1753-5894 scope. To what extent does the constant nagging of American exceptionalism during the early republic necessitate the limits of broader perspective? In short, is it more crucial to place America’s identities within an Atlantic world or to incorporate elements of the Atlantic world within America’s identities? Deconstruction ‘Nationalism’ Before engaging the recent books, it is important to trace the theoretical and historiographical models upon which they are patterned. The study of ‘nationalism’ and ‘identity’ has a long history itself. Benedict Anderson’s highly influential Imagined Communities argued that the advent of print culture in the mid-eighteenth century introduced ‘unified fields of exchange and communication below Latin and above the spoken vernaculars’, a development that laid the foundations for modern conceptions of nationalism. ‘The convergence of capitalism and print technology’, he wrote, ‘created the possibility of a new form of imagined community, which in its basic morphology set the stage for the modern nation’. The American Revolution was the first movement to take advantage of this development, serving, as Anderson put it, as a ‘Creole pioneer’ for the rest of modernity to follow.6 This connection of print culture and nationalism, what Anthony Smith has termed ‘classical modernism’, has become the standard framework for understanding the rise of nationalist sentiments in the western hemisphere.7 Yet this general thesis has been challenged of late, on several fronts. While many recent theories share Anderson’s presupposition concerning the importance of print, there is increasing doubt that such interconnectivity can produce broad consensus. Instead of understanding nationalism as a ‘result’, an interconnected nation sharing a general 81 49th Parallel, Vol. 34 (Autumn 2014) Park ISSN: 1753-5894 framework of values and ideals, many now argue that nationalism should be seen as a ‘process’.8 For instance, Prasenjit Duara has written that ‘to see the nation as a collective subject of modernity obscures the nature of national identity’. Instead, it is more fruitful to ‘view national identity as founded upon fluid relationships; it thus both resembles and is interchangeable with other political identities’. Any conception of ‘nationalism’, Duara continued, is ‘rarely the nationalism of the nation, but rather represents the site where very different views of the nation contest and negotiate with each other’. It is only through the comparison of localised ‘national identities’ and the broader ‘nation-state’ that we can distinguish the uniqueness and significance of various nationalisms.9 Similarly, Rogers Brubaker has argued that ‘we should refrain from only seeing nations’ as ‘substantial, enduring collectivities’, but instead ‘think about nationalism without nations’ in order to see ‘nation as a category of practice, nationhood as an institutionalised cultural and political form, and nationness as a contingent event or happening’.10 Nationalism, then, is a form of ‘practice’, not a result. Such a revised framework forces historians to examine individual and local particulars on their own terms rather than as examples of a universal whole.11 A second challenge to Anderson’s thesis attacks the standard belief that nationalism itself originates with print culture, an association that has dominated the study of print culture. Karl Deutsch’s foundational Nationalism and Social Communication presupposed that the first step toward a national identity was a public utterance by elite figures whose words then trickled down to mass culture through print and messengers.12 More recently, Miroslav Hroch further elaborated on this process by presenting three ‘phrases’ of nationalism, the first of which involved ‘initial agitation’ on 82 49th Parallel, Vol. 34 (Autumn 2014) Park ISSN: 1753-5894 the part of a few elite figures in hopes of correcting and transforming the larger culture.13 Yet these perspectives,